Frank commentary from an unretired call girl

Pathologization

A new disease? I know not, new or old,
But it may well be called poor mortals’ plague:
For, like a pestilence, it doth infect
The houses of the brain…
Till not a thought, or motion, in the mind,
Be free from the black poison of suspect. – Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour (II, iii)

One of the problems with trying to get people to recognize the problems in the cultural, political and legal status quo is that they have an amazing capacity for seeing exactly what they want to see, and for ignoring contradictory evidence when it’s right in front of them. Jacob Sullum of Reason pointed out a fine example of this in the New York Times obituary of the brilliant and crusading psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who died at the beginning of last month. Sullum wrote:

The New York Timesobituary for Thomas Szasz…says his critique of psychiatry “had some merit in the 1950s…but not later on, when the field began developing more scientific approaches”…In fact, however, Szasz’s radicalism, which he combined with a sharp wit, a keen eye for obfuscating rhetoric, and an uncompromising dedication to individual freedom and responsibility, was one of his greatest strengths…driven by a “passion against coercion,” [Szasz] zeroed in on the foundational fallacies underlying all manner of medicalized tyranny…

In response to the Times’ claim that Szasz’s criticism of the “mental health” industry lacked “merit” after the 1950s, Sullum points out that:

…it was not until 1973 that the…APA…stopped calling homosexuality a mental disorder. More often, psychiatry has expanded its domain. Today it encompasses myriad sins and foibles, including smoking, overeating, gambling, shoplifting, sexual promiscuity, pederasty, rambunctiousness, inattentiveness, social awkwardness, anxiety, sadness, and political extremism…As Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine,observed last year…”there are no objective signs or tests for mental illness…and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often unclear. That makes it possible to expand diagnostic boundaries or even create new diagnoses in ways that would be impossible, say, in a field like cardiology.” In other words, mental illnesses are whatever psychiatrists say they are…

Though I don’t often mention it, I actually minored in psychology and could have turned it into a dual major with only about two more semesters of work. I say this not to grant myself authority, but to explain why I’ve paid such close attention to developments in the field over the past three decades. During that time I’ve often been dismayed or even alarmed by what I see, especially in the area of fad diagnoses of serious mental disorders made for no reason other than to please parents, cater to legal authorities, make money or (worst of all) go along with the crowd. Multiple personality disorder was once considered so rare that DSM-II and DSM-III both classed it as a subtype of dissociative disorder, but in the mid-1980s somebody realized that its description in DSM-III was so vague that practically any mode of behavior could be described as a separate personality, and it soon became a hugely popular fad diagnosis. Until the error was rectified in DSM-IV over 40,000 cases were diagnosed in the US alone, much to the delight of the “repressed memory” crowd, the drivers of the “Satanic Panic” and criminal prosecutors; for example, in 1990 a Wisconsin man was charged with rape for consensual sex with a 26-year-old woman on the grounds that she had multiple personality disorder and the personality of a six-year-old had unexpectedly emerged during intercourse.

In 1994 the APA closed the loophole which allowed over-diagnosis of multiple personalities, but it simultaneously opened (or at least neglected to plug) many others; since then normal behaviors have been increasingly pathologized by quacks, hired guns and those whose professional ethics take a back seat to promoting an agenda. Much of this involves uncommon or even rare disorders being misapplied to much larger groups, such as claims that sex workers commonly suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or that migrant workers who deny being passively “trafficked” do so because of Stockholm syndrome; fully 10% of American schoolboys are now being drugged daily because of quacks misdiagnosing their normal boyishness as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in order to please female teachers and single mothers who subscribe to “social construction of gender” and therefore refuse to accept that normal male behavior is innately different from normal female behavior. But even beyond that, imaginary “disorders” are created to describe perfectly normal human conduct which politicians find inconvenient or fanatics dislike; for example, the totally understandable resentment young people feel when they’re treated as “children” (or spoiled younger kids’ predictable tantrums when they don’t get their own way) is now pathologized as “Oppositional Defiant Disorder”, and the normal male attraction to adolescent girls is both pathologized by many psychologists and wrongfully conflated with pedophilia in the public mind. The state, of course, uses this omnipathologization as a tool of increasing state control:

…For more than half a century, Szasz stubbornly highlighted the hazards of joining such a fuzzy, subjective concept with the force of law through involuntary treatment, the insanity defense, and other psychiatrically informed policies. Consider “sexually violent predators,” who are convicted and imprisoned based on the premise that they could have restrained themselves but failed to do so, then committed to mental hospitals after completing their sentences based on the premise that they suffer from irresistible urges and therefore pose an intolerable threat to public safety. From a Szaszian perspective, this incoherent theory is a cover for what is really going on: the retroactive enhancement of duly imposed sentences by politicians who decided certain criminals were getting off too lightly—a policy so plainly contrary to due process and the rule of law that it had to be dressed up in quasi-medical, pseudoscientific justifications…

This is the greatest danger of what Szasz termed “the ‘therapeutic state,’ the unhealthy alliance of medicine and government that blesses all sorts of unjustified limits on liberty, ranging from the mandatory prescription system to laws against suicide.” Once mercenary or authoritarian physicians and psychologists get in bed with the government, their authority can be added to its own to justify control not only over persons, but also over foods, drugs, sex acts or anything else they can be bribed or commanded to declare “unhealthy”.

81 Responses

The “social construction of gender” makes me mad more than several other stupid feminist theories combined. It’s just ridiculous. That said, I am no stranger to the supposed “PTSD epidemic”, as I live in Croatia, where the number of people who supposedly have it (from war in early 90’s) dwarfs the total personnel of the army that fought it. It is not just a scientific, but also a moral tragedy because all of those people have been granted huge pensions.

Igniss, in a war zone it isn’t only the soldiers that get PTSD. Think of the civilians in WWII Europe (Western, Eastern, and Soviet) or Asia and what they experienced. Do you think the survivors of Stalingrad, Nanking, Dresden, or Tokyo were unaffected? The horrors of war aren’t the sole province of soldiers. And the civilian population is so very much larger.

Is it overblown and abused? Of course. Especially when money is involved.

I actually did my degree in psychology before doing consulting work in research/science more generally. Way back when I first heard of Szasz he was given little more than a quick mention for posterity in my second-year abnormal psychology course. The implicit attitude seemed to be “Oh, and there was a guy named Szasz who said that this is all hocus-pocus, but you needn’t pay him any attention. Because… Science!”. My experience from bouncing around fields doing consulting work is that Szasz was basically correct. Even though I think a lot of people currently diagnosed with diseases are genuinely distressed and can even plausibly be helped by contemporary treatments, I don’t think the disease label really applies. When so many fall under the ‘not otherwise specified’ diagnostic level, the specificity of the diagnosis is so poor so as to be meaningless.

Then you have people like Farley taking a screening measure for PTSD symptoms (which is perfectly fine in and of itself) and using it as a firm diagnosis tool in their research (which is categorically not fine). Screening measures are an important and pragmatic tool for measuring phenomena that would otherwise be too difficult to measure in large-scale studies, but they are not diagnostic tests. They have a known error rate and often over-estimate the prevalence of whatever it is they are measure (i.e., capture both cases and borderline cases).

Pretending a screening tool is a diagnostic measure for a diagnosis of a disease that probably isn’t really a disease. Very meta.

Not to excuse the drugging of children, but a major reason why teachers favor this is because class sizes are too big, and therefore teachers can’t handle active kids as well as with a small class size. I doubt it’s because they subscribe to the “social-gender” theory.

In fact, this is one of the issues of the recent Chicago teacher’s strike: class size.

@Susan: “Not to excuse the drugging of children, but a major reason why teachers favor this is because class sizes are too big . . . ”

Beg to differ, but when I was growing up and attending parochial school in a working-class town in Northeast New Jersey in the ’50s and ’60s, our typical class size was 58-60 students. One teacher, no teacher’s aides, no special ed., no striking teachers whinging about how they can’t manage to teach . . . and no meds. So what is the definition of “too big”?

I can’t imagine we — boys and girls — were any less active and rambunctious than today’s kids, though we (in general) were taught a higher level of respect for our teachers and school authorities (really just one school authority, the Principal), and that originated in the home, not in some sensitivity session or politically correct mumbo-jumbo. While not encouraged, there was plenty of non-PC name calling in that ethically diverse town, but we still all wound up in class together every day.

Shock of shocks, most of us grew up to go on to high school, get good college-entry test scores, get into good schools or enter a trade, and go on to be most of what we wanted to be, whether that was to be a white-collar professional, a fire fighter, or, in at least one (rather predictable) case of which I am aware, a criminal. In other words, we covered the gamut, all with what today would be considered huge class sizes and without drugs or a high drop-out rate.

One regret I have is that it is my generation that, while we helped change the country and the world, in many ways for the better, also helped create the current morass that passes for the so-called educational system in this country today. And while I don’t oppose smaller class sizes, they certainly have not led to a better outcome for our students, and neither has pumping drugs into our kids on a scale not seen anywhere else in the world (save perhaps in Canada).

You went to a private school, and that does not count. Private schools have a choice of who they accept and who they don’t, and public schools have to take EVERY child, no exceptions.

If you had misbehaved enough, that school would have simply kicked your ass out. Or if your grades hadn’t been good enough, your parents wouldn’t have paid for it. Either way, it would’ve been public school for you.

That is not an accurate portrayal of parochial schools, especially in the time period mentioned. They prided themselves on dealing with the most troubled students and helping them to succeed. I don’t expect you to agree, but fine, I went to public schools in the ’60s and ’70s and I can’t think of single class under 35 students with only one teacher each and one principal and we boys were just as twitchy as boys are today. The difference was the higher energy level for boys was recognized and we were given greater unstructured free time (two recess periods in addition to PE) where the boys ran around like maniacs while the girls tried to ignore us as much as possible. Having now put two boys through high school and into college and now with a girl facing high school, I can tell you it is exactly the social attitude on gender that is the problem exacerbated by the idiocy of zero tolerance policies. Today’s teachers expect boys and girls to act exactly the same and, ironically enough, after our disastrous early experience with public schools we found it was the terrible, reactionary Catholic schools that handled the issues the right way. My mother is a retired school teacher who left precisely because of the stupidity of the newly enlightened were bringing to the profession. Good teachers understood that calling on boys and having them demonstrate concepts at the board was a better way for them to learn and get them focused on class more as boys tend to learn better through activity rather than lecture, and so helped class discipline because engaged students are less likely to misbehave than bored ones. But of course that became signs that teachers were discriminating against girls and we can’t have that, so we devolved the classroom to where the modern answer is drugs.

Ditto my experience in the public school system. I never saw a class size less than 35 until I got in to my physics and chemistry classes in high school. And my elementary school had only a single janitor for each school building, a part time music teacher, a school nurse and the lunch ladies. The principal also taught 1st grade. We had two 15 minute recess periods and a 40 minute lunch and pickup games for football and softball were the norm.

Your impression of parochial schools in that time period are the same as mine, I started 1st in 1960. I did know kids that went to church parochial schools, and they weren’t the easy ones. I was paddled, they were paddled more (and really, it wasn’t a big deal, I wasn’t beaten but I was embarrassed). I think there’s a moving baseline issue here where what is now is mistaken as being what was then. The “they only take the best behaved and smartest” is more, in my thinking, a response to failing public schools, tuition vouchers, and the NEA propaganda (propaganda doesn’t mean “lie”, only a one-sided, self-serving portrayal).

You could not be more wrong in your assessment. To equate the parochial (i.e., Catholic) school I (and hundreds of thousands of other students) attended with the common conception of private schools is a false equation.

The only criterion for accepting students was that the family be a member of our parish. This crossed all socio-economic, ethnic, and racial lines (though admittedly, like the town, we were pretty much an all-white school at the time, but with a smattering of refugees from the Hungarian revolution, a refugee or two of Castro’s takeover of Cuba, and even one Canadian). We were co-ed K-8, and there were more than a few troublemakers and bullies (and we would both be happy not to get me started on that). I don’t know of anyone who was expelled from the school, though some (more than inelegantly referred to as “retards”) were held back a year on occasion.

As for my parents (both of whom were teachers in the public schools, by the way, including in the Central Ward of Newark later in their careers, and where class sizes in the 30-35 range — average for the day — were common), they paid the princely sum of $10/year, as I recall, for tuition and the decade and a half-old textbooks we had (history ended prior to the start of World War II), the rest being subsidized, I imagine, by the diocese.

I think many of KHorn’s and c andrew’s observations are correct. I can also add that I encountered instances of what I now would consider sexual abuse (and even then knew was pretty sick behavior) at the hands of the nuns, who I think even then demonstrated at least a sub-conscious preference for girls. Fortunately no one thought to resort to drugs at that time (rulers, bare-handed slaps, imaginary spanking machines, and . . . hmmmm . . . pinking shears, being preferred instruments of control), and somehow we managed to make it through and actually learn something in the process.

The problems with American education have multiple sources, and drugging kids is not going to solve them, any more than smaller class sizes will.

OK, so what is the answer? Bring back recess? I agree that that is a big step in the right direction.

And if you tell me that kids were just better people back in the day, I’m butting out of the conversation. It won’t be one worth having. The same if all I get is something to the effect of government be bad. Other than recess, HOW were things better?

It’s not that the kid’s were better, it’s how we dealt with kids and how we deal with them now. What we teach them and how they reflect that. I free-ranged from 6 or 7 and on in the San Gabriel Valley. If I wanted to see my Great-Grandfather, I told my grandparents, and walked the mile and and half to two miles along roads with no sidewalks (got my first experience with why you didn’t touch electric fences along the way) and enjoyed his really good baking skills (my friends all wanted to go to his house, he made great cookies). How many parents would allow that today? It was a great experience on the way to adulthood, denied to too many children these last few decades.

Recess would be a big step for males. It’s necessary and not optional for males. We develop differently. XX isn’t the norm, XX and XY are the norms, no matter what the MA Sociologist principal said at my children’s first school (this ass also totally denied the existence of “show me yours, I’ll show you mine”, our child psychologist said simply “she’s an idiot”).

Anyway, how were things better? It is really simple, no kid would say to a parent “I’ll call CPS if you won’t give me what I want”. Or, when the local grocer dragged my ass to my grandparents because I stole a Double-Bubble my grandparents didn’t threaten him with police for touching me. They didn’t spank me, but damn the talking-to hurt.

Childhood is not an end in itself, it is a road leading to adulthood. Keep them off that road and you get what a lot of psychologists say is happening and will continue to happen, adults that are still children. Narcissists. Never taught adulthood, spared the experiences that allow you to deal with tragedy and adversity.

Unfortunately, because I can’t follow the thread lines, I have no idea which comment your 11:19 PM reply actually addresses. I have no anchor to deal with this: “And if you tell me that kids were just better people back in the day, I’m butting out of the conversation. It won’t be one worth having. The same if all I get is something to the effect of government be bad. Other than recess, HOW were things better?”

Okay: 1) said it earlier, children weren’t taught that childhood was an end in itself; 2) we accepted authority in context (I’ve spent numerous hours in detention because I have a mouth and reject authority unless honest and sensible, I made the Honor’s list throughout JHS and HS, made Valedictorian in Junior HS, and would have been Valedictorian of my HS in CA but went to AZ after a family death and lost position); 3) we were allowed to make mistakes, suffer the consequences (my habit of vaulting chain link fences led to two broken arms), and learn from them (I quit vaulting fences after the second break) without hovering or attempts to restrict the behavior for the good of neurotic parents; 4) Government is bad, government is good, parenting is bad, parenting is good, neither are solely good or bad, but when parents became adversaries with the school, teachers became adversaries with parents, schools go zero brain-dead tolerance, SRO’s taser or beat children, government went bad this locale; 5) my childhood was delightful, it wasn’t free of pain or threat, or injury, but it wasn’t the neurotic childhood we give now to be safe (cops beat disagreeable people so they can feel safe, and use that excuse to justify the beatings, see “sucker punch silly string”, they are the adults of our training). HOW were things better? We weren’t so crippling our children. That’s how things were better.

BTW, my state has a special license plate: “Childhood shouldn’t hurt”, drawing that from memory and may be a paraphrase. I lost three really close family members from 8 to 15 and a half. The one at eight I had the privilege of seeing his blood at my school bus stop, a big stain on a wide Boulevard. I really want to stop these self-satisfied people and give them a piece of my mind. Life hurts and life is joyous. It is what we make of it, through the training ground of childhood and its fruition in adulthood.

Extremely well-said, Ariel, especially the point about childhood being a stage rather than an end in itself. To the Child Cultists, childhood and “innocence” are holy totems to be worshipped and revered, and we severely punish any attempt to allow children to progress toward adulthood until the sacred Age of Shazam. Any adult-like or growth-generating experience before that age, from free-ranging to sexual behavior to responsibility, is strictly taboo, and the result is a disaster. As Sailor B would point out, it isn’t the kids; it’s what society is doing to stunt their growth.

“To the Child Cultists, childhood and “innocence” are holy totems to be worshipped and revered, and we severely punish any attempt to allow children to progress toward adulthood until the sacred Age of Shazam.”

Now that should be in stone in D.C, as well every capitol of every state. If childhood were an end to itself, we should all remain children. Why change?

Childhood is a training ground for adulthood, nothing more and not deserving of some sick, narcissistic nostalgic adulation. If you aren’t trained as a child to be an adult, you are an adult by age but still a child. Why is this so missed?

As for innocence, children can be both the epitome of kindly innocence and the epitome of cruel sadism. We are supposed to train them to a moderation, not worship their excesses.

OK, thanks. Some of this, in fact a good deal of it, I can and do agree with. We need to get past the idea that Chester the Molester is hiding behind every tree, and let our kids go outside and play. Kids do still like to climb trees, they still like swings and monkey bars. It’s our conviction that the world is more dangerous than it really is that keeps the kids indoors, as surely as any computer some may want to blame. Recess is a great idea, and I do believe that it’s good for girls too. But boys really need it.

BTW, and you know this but just to put it out there: drugging the boys into a zombified state doesn’t produce normal girl behavior either, it’s just easier for a teacher to deal with.

Zero tolerance = zero brains. Kids will not have respect for authority which shows itself to be stupid. They might go along to get along, but respect? If you don’t deserve it, don’t expect it. And schools with zero tolerance policies don’t deserve it.

I have some good news for you: the narcissism of today’s kids is highly exaggerated. Not saying there aren’t any narcissistic kids, just that it isn’t the epidemic some like to think it is. Every generation is condemned as being shallow, self-centered, defiant, slutty, stupid, lacking in basic good sense. Oh, and they listen to crazy music, too. One would think that intellectual and moral achievement peaked somewhere about the time of Lucy, and it’s been all downhill since then. Well, today’s kids aren’t that bad. Considering things like adult paranoia and zero-tolerance and society scapegoating them like mad, they’re really a marvel.

As the Who assured us in 1965, the kids are all right. Be we grown-ups aren’t doing well by them.

The “every generation is condemned” is an old argument drawn from some Greek or Roman observer. In the late 60s, I was told we were the best and brightest by some, the worst and stupidest by others. Truth was on both sides.

“Oh, and they listen to crazy music, too.” Another bromide that doesn’t actually look at the reality, the music. Hip hop and rap isn’t equivalent to rock or pop, and for God’s sake not Sinatra or Darin (I went from Black Sabbath to appreciating Sinatra and Darin, a long road). Hip hop and rap are a nasty, misogynist, foul, profane, and degrading music. The Rolling Stones at their worst are church choir. Even Alt and Indie music isn’t as bad. Guess what many in MS and HS listen to for music? There is actually a difference between “I want to hold your hand” and “I want to fuck your pussy, you ho” (actual line from a song I overheard, now deleted). I was a Jefferson Airplane, Doors, Rolling Stones, and Black Sabbath baby. Were they bad compared to Rosemary Clooney? Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that that bad is somehow equal to this bad (never heard Jagger putting out “I want to fuck your pussy, you ho”, maybe I missed it somewhere in Brown Sugar). Don’t let the baseline move too far and then think it hasn’t move, or worse, know its moved and claim the movement means nothing.

Lucy wasn’t homo sapiens sapiens, so I wouldn’t start there.

“As the Who assured us in 1965, the kids are all right”, except they were singing about the Baby Boomers, the group most responsible for adult paranoia, zero-tolerance, and society scapegoating (litigation). I prefer the dissolute sociopathic “Behind Blue Eyes” by Limp Bizkit than by the Who (too upbeat for the lyrics). You may have just given me a justifiable reason.

The leap from “I want to hold your hand” to “I want to fuck your pussy, you ho” is something for Carl Lewis, but the jump from “why don’t we do it in the road” or “I’ve got you under my thumb” is a little bit shorter. And “do it in the road” was probably as distasteful to your parents as “fuck your pussy, you ho” is to you. Of course I don’t know your parents, maybe “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” is their favorite song of all time, but it was pretty shocking to a lot.

Hip hop is just some of the music kids listen to nowadays. It’s valued for its rhythms, its skillful wordplay (it really is more than just “I want to fuck your pussy, you ho” and even that has to be hard to work into a song w/o compromising rhyme and rhythm), and yes, it’s shock value. It doesn’t seem to have the angry political content it once did, or maybe that’s just me. I don’t care for most of it myself (born 1966), but I like some (some!) of the pop that they listen to, and I love love love me some psy-trance.

The Baby boomers in the 60s were the best and brightest, as well as the worst and stupidest. Just like every other generation in its youth. But! there were and are so dang many of them, that they had and continue to have a greater influence on society than other, less numerous generations.

You argument is actually only illustrating a moving baseline. Nothing more. Shock value is meaningless. Would you be shocked if you went to a restaurant where a couple were copulating over a table? By your argument, 20 years from now if it didn’t shock, no big deal. No difference.

Your examples: “Under my Thumb” is about control (dominance over a dominant female who did him wrong): “Why don’t we do it in the Road” is no more than an expression of unbridled sexuallity (I have a feeling most of our parents did it in the forest or on the kitchen table, God I ate there, but doing it in the road is problematic). The most shocking lyrics I can think of in the sixties is Seegar’s “you can have this fucking world…”, I forget the song title, and airplay was not extensive initially.

I was born in ’54, and enjoyed the 2 British Invasions (the Kinks, such gods, and the Animals, among many) as well the American psychedelic rock of the late sixties (Grace Slick is unparalleled, even if you liked Janis, and Morrison, can you really argue?). Even more so the resurgence in the very late 70s of New Wave (also enjoyed punk and it’s close relatives prior). The Police with their back beat, the Clash with discordance and politics, and MIdnight Oil with politics (Aussie but still pertinent) were my favorite groups. Ok, I liked the Motels too, but whatever. All of this paragraph is a digression.

Now, my second favorite author after Hemingway is Miller. I’ve never read a novel where an author could use the word cunt (am I in trouble here?) as reverential and insulting on the same page (printer’s fault or not). I forget the painter, I only remember he was 19th Century and the title had “World” in it, but his painting of female genitalia was exquisite and reverential. It makes all the difference. People were of course shocked by the songs of the sixties but I don’t know that they were coarsened (unless the incremental “slippery slope” comes into play). I do think that “I want to fuck your pussy, you ho” is coarsened, because it does lack the reverence and does reduce women to a pleasurable hole. Personally, I don’t want to be reduced to a pleasurable rod, or a sperm donor. I will not reduce women to that “hole” concept.

As for parents, my grand-parents were earthy on all subjects (they hated the music more from stance than more the lyrics, and more over the music than the lyrics). Now, my bio-mother, my little Mormon bio-mother, loved the White Album. In fact, two years prior on my thirteenth birthday I had a Playboy subscription. Mormons, just when you think you know them…

Your argument is only a justification of a moving baseline.

I have to put on Darin’s “Beyond the Sea” now, if only not to think of my wife as a ho or hole.

This song has three whole words which were written in the Sixties. You might even recognize the voice.

White Rabbit has me thinking you’re right about Grace Slick. I even wrote a parody of it, Transrabbit. “We Built This City,” on the other hand… Just kidding; WBTC is a catchy little song.

The stuff in hip hop about bitches and hos and pop a cap in yo ass is what happens when very rich old white men discover that the main consumers of hip hop are white middle class men aged fourteen to twenty-nine. So the very rich old white men pay fairly rich young black men to enact a stereotype for the entertainment of middle class young white men. It’s like watching a western from the Fifties and some Generic Indian Character says “Me walk’um heap big trail” or something. It isn’t that any American Indian has ever talked like that; it’s that the studio wouldn’t pay him to say something intelligent. This is what the studio was selling the white middle class audience. Well, “I want to fuck your pussy, you ho” is what the record company is selling the white middle class audience. This also explains why rap is seldom about social injustice anymore. Me walk’um heap big trail, you ho.

Unfortunately, Sailor Barsoom, I can’t seem to keep my reply to your last point on this thread. I have to move back and forth between tabs, if I misquote you or argue erroneously (meaning your last comment did not include anything close to what I’m arguing against) forgive me. But you can bite me, take that either way because I mean both. Just lost a tooth tonight so it’s on my mind.

Your first link went nowhere, it happens, but taking me to Starship? Really, I, oh god this hurts, really hurts, but yeah, oh it hurts, I liked some of Starship because of Grace Slick, but she should have gone elsewhere. Lather, Today, White Rabbit, etc., from Airplane was the penultimate Slick. Starship hurts.

However, this “The stuff in hip hop about bitches and hos and pop a cap in yo ass is what happens when very rich old white men discover that the main consumers of hip hop are white middle class men aged fourteen to twenty-nine. So the very rich old white men pay fairly rich young black men to enact a stereotype for the entertainment of middle class young white men” is like teen idols in the late fifties early sixties, the problem is your wrong

1. “Hip hop, and Rap, are so very much white guy phenomenum.” Hate to tell, but MoTown started to break the mold, and today HipHop and Rap are as likely to have a black producer as white (they have come so far, even if we don’t notice).
2. Demographics whatever, but my HipHop and Rap listeners are white teenage females, that includes all the girls my daughters bring home. The demographic may be slanted to white males, by whatever poll, but all my experience is white females.
3. “It’s like watching a western from the Fifties and some Generic Indian Character says “Me walk’um heap big trail” or something. It isn’t that any American Indian has ever talked like that; it’s that the studio wouldn’t pay him to say something intelligent. This is what the studio was selling the white middle class audience.” A stretch that caused some of my ligaments to fail because it really had nothing to do with what we are discussing. However, you should have caught the John Ford westerns, some of his heroes were “half-breeds” and his Cavalry officers often expressed respect for Indians, and misgivings about the Army’s methods. The Indians spoke both a dialect and broken. Never did understand my Italian great-grandmother either.
4. “Well, “I want to fuck your pussy, you ho” is what the record company is selling the white middle class audience.” So blacks today go for Muddy Waters, Billie Holiday, and the Uncle Toms Sinatra and Darin? Of course it sells more to whites, 72% versus 13%, it would have to have a larger white audience. BTW, I’m predominately, almost wholly, German on one side, French, Brit, Scot -Irish, and NA (enough to make me hesitate on which box to check for race) on the other, but the last two censuses caused my right arm to twitch, had to smack it down numerous times, thought Sellers’ ghost had me, color is so important. Especially when white male is a useful tool.

However, I never brought up audience color. Has nothing to do with it, nothing, zero, zip, nada. It’s the moving baseline that’s important on how we view others; I have daughters so it is important to me. They are not holes. They have them, but they are just 50% of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, the other half have to adjust themselves.

White males, really, hang your hat on that one? White males are the degenerates of the human race, without them we would be so much more spiritual, so god-like? I’m basing this on my original point about Rap and HipHop, as well my above zero, zip, nada, on again the moving baseline. As for race, in a sane society neither Lena Horne nor Halle Berry would be Black, any more than I’m NA (placing my thumb and forefinger on my very high, horizontal, predominate cheek bones puts their center above the center of my eyes, as with my mother, her father, and his NA mother, so what). Unless they choose to be, as I choose German. I have this feeling….

As for “cap in your ass”, if I could find the song that uses that specific phrase, an Hispanic sounding group, I would. I’ll go with “Foster the People”. Neither song typifies women as holes, though they may be veiled descriptions of how police deal with non-police. Couldn’t help myself.

What happened with that first link was weird. I’ll posting it w/o all the “turn a word into a link” stuff. It doesn’t hurt that the title and only lyrics happen to reflect a subject of great interest to me.

Hip hop’s biggest consumers are white teens and twenty-somethings because, as you point out, there are just so many more whites than anyone else. Has nothing to do with white folks being innately evil. As a man of Caucasian Persuasion myself, I sure hope I’m not destined for evil. But it makes a difference whether you’re trying to sell an image of black life to white teenagers or black thirty-somethings. That’s why the music is all about I’m a player and I got mine and my Bentley and them hos. It isn’t about being trapped in a life you didn’t choose and yet are blamed for, or about getting out of that life but some people will see you as anything but a nigga. It used to be, but there was more money in materialism and the modern equivalent of “me walk’em heap big trail.” It’s the money, and I, like you, wish there was more money in “you’re wonderful” than in “fuck your pussy, you ho.” But again, there’s always a worst example. That heap big quote BTW isn’t from any particular movie; it’s just the sort of thing you heard in those movies.

Whatever ancestry the rapper or the producer carry around, it’s often (I won’t say always) an older white man who owns the record company. That doesn’t make him evil, but it does mean he doesn’t have the deep experience of black life (just like I don’t) which would make it important to him to have it portrayed accurately. And of course there’s no reason to think that an owner or producer (or rapper) of any age or color or cultural bent is immune to the benefits of giving an audience what it wants.

This is a weird conversation for me, since I don’t care for most hip hop myself. This whole musical thing spun off of one short sentence I typed several replies up. Suffice to say: every generation disapproves of the next generation’s taste in music. This is unlikely to change, but there is one thing which gives me hope. This is the fact that many kids no longer find it necessary to return the favor. There are plenty of teens who have a couple of Beatles songs on the iPod, or who think Hendrix a god among guitarists, or who cried when Michael Jackson died. Maybe the parents will follow suit. Not “they’ll think all of their kids’ music is glorious,” but will remember that the worst example isn’t everything, and that their parents thought they were nuts, too.

“The problems with American education have multiple sources, and drugging kids is not going to solve them, any more than smaller class sizes will.”

Applause, loud, really loud applause. Class size has been the biggest piece of self-serving crap for too many years. I was in 25 to 35 in elementary school (over that is still rare today). Just read about a rural school that has 45 in one class room, all ages, all grades. There hasn’t been a study that showed a direct correlation to class size and performance, nor money spent and performance. Its more complex but not to the Union.

Drugging kids, especially boys, to fit a matriarchal paradigm doesn’t work. (I was on the Rules and Safety Committee for my kid’s school for one school year. A school my wife and I successfully moved them from as soon as we could. I’ll sum it up paraphrasing the one kindergarten teacher: “you aren’t making rules about bad behavior, you’re making rules against being a boy”. She, and I, were really adamant that these were sexist rules, counter-productive, and destructive. The rules were from the District admin, and not one other female in the group cared how it affected boys. I was the only male. I had never experienced a group of full blown sexist asses until then.)

I look at the hyper-overdiagnosis of ADHD in adolescent males as constitutional approval of a form of von Munchausen by proxy. Hear me out.

12-13 y/o boy, antsy in his seat in class, cannot focus on his work, grades dropping a bit. Tiger mom (of any race) wants better grades and to stop the boy from bouncing off the walls. Mother needs to have a diagnosis. Mother needs her son to be labelled to make it all right. Her answer? DRUGS. Of course. She uses mother’s little helper (likely Xanax or similar) to feel normal, so her boy should have something too. Seems right. Right?

Yeah, not so much.

My diagnosis? 12-13 y/o boys are SUPPOSED to be full of energy. It is normal for them to be antsy in their seats. Hell, they are sitting next to sweet little Suzy and every time he sees her cute little boobies he gets an uncomfortable boner. Of course he is re-adjusting his posture and his trousers and his wood. Of course. I consider this normal.

In reality, ya can’t fix normal.

My solution? Cut back on the sugar intake, increase his dietary protein, allow a lot more outdoor time, and explain to him the erections and the feelings are a part of growing up. His own understanding of his situation will help loads. For gosh sake, get him some loose fitting pants!

Please don’t ask me how I know. All those boners in 7th grade about killed me.

I agree with this to a great degree. Ritalin is remarkably similar to cocaine, and Desoxyn is methamphetamine. I don’t mean that it’s like meth or that it might as well be be meth; I mean that it is meth — the exact same molecule.

I was briefly, as a little boy, put on Ritalin. My mother took me off of it because she didn’t like how I was on it, and because a relative was stealing it for recreational use.

I’m not saying that these two chemicals have never helped anyone, and I’m sure as bleeding hell not saying I want them banned. But I rather suspect that they are over-prescribed.

Sorry, but Ritalin is remarkably similar to cocaine like Hydrogen Peroxide is to water. One substitution makes a lot of difference. Water oxidates, H2O2 really oxidates.

Desoxyn is meth (horrors), but meth is levo or dextro, and that too makes a difference, and I can’t find a reference that really settles the issue as to effect. Wiki says meth, but leaves the levo or dextro undefined.

This was drilled into me in college during my ChE courses, similar does not mean same (in fact in can mean different, 111 Trichloroethane is much different than 112 in properties). Levo and dextro are really important distinctions.

Ok, I’m going to correct myself. With Levo (S for sinister) and Dextro (R for well right), you should have the same compound but with different polarization. They may or may not have different properties

As isomers, you get into structural (with its breakdowns) and stereo (with its breakdowns). Depending on degree so goes properties, some isomers being vastly different in properties. Damn, have I forgotten my chemistry. Any chemist want to jump in, slap me, and give the right take?

I’m not a chemist, but from what I remember stereoisomers have the same physical properties (i.e. they look the same, measure the same, have the same melting point, chemically combine the same in reactions with simple molecules), but different biochemical properties because the enzymes designed for dextroisomers won’t “fit” on levoisomers.

My brother’s a pharmacist and he walked me through a discussion of left and right isomers for one particular case. NSAIDs generally have both left and right isomers and I don’t remember which one does what, but one handed isomer is what reduces inflammation and the other hand is what eats holes in your gastric mucosa. There was something in there about Cox 1 and Cox 2 inhibitors and prostglandins (sp?).

The punch line was that some drug company had successfully put together a ChE process that would turn out the correct-handed isomer to give you the anti-inflammatory effect without the gastric erosion. But in some people with a genetic predisposition, two or three steps down the secondary metabolites (IIRC) would cause serious liver damage. And these things don’t always show up in clinical trials.

He figures that we’re in an awkward phase right now; we have sophisticated drug manufacturing capacity, but no method (other than clinical trials) to weed out problems like this. Once the pharmacologists figure out how to map drug interactions onto peoples’ MHC & MiHC it will transform the pharmaceutical industry.

Yep, something to the right may not fit like something to the left, for obvious reasons if you have a lefty trying to use right handed scissors.. Problem is of course that I don’t know every enzyme. I do agree that chemical properties are different than biochemical properties, I just can’t weight it. But I’ll defer, because that’s my sense of it too. The isomer state is really important, I just don’t know how overwhelmingly important biochemically.

I meant that Ritalin is “remarkably similar” to cocaine in effects, not in chemical structure. But since I then talk about Desoxyn and methamphetamine being “the exact same molecule,” um… yeah I phrased that poorly. Sorry, my bad.

The Wikipedia entry on Ritalin says that it’s less potent than cocaine, but longer lasting. This could be the sort of difference you’re talking about.

Yes, a little difference can be a big difference. Even a non-chemist like me can understand that. Take a molecule I’ve been reading up on a lot the last couple of years, MDMA. Well, if you chop off that little lizard head, you get meth. But they hardly have the same effects.

Yeah, except H202 is quicker and less lasting than water, so my example wasn’t actually the best. Point was on the substitution. Substitutions are the world of pharma; whole new properties with one or more substitutions.

BTW, an interesting carrier solvent is MSO, Methyl Sulfoxide. You might look it up. A great solvent through the skin barrier, and problematic therefore.

I have a daughter with ADHD that morphed slowly out of ADHD into ODD. I can understand the reticence to accept the diagnosis if you haven’t experienced it. I do agree that boys are over diagnosed because of a matriarchal prejudice in elementary, even middle, schools, and a complicity by psychologists who tend to buy into the latest societal myths (boys and girls are the same, its societal gender forcing that makes boys “bad”).

As for my daughter, my wife and I had phrase descriptions for our children: the Writer/Speaker; the Artist/Explorer; the Bright Angel. They were based on the dominant characteristics of each. The Bright Angel came out of the womb polite. By middle three, she knew her alphabet, was beginning to read, and was also learning to add and subtract. By four, she was reading and was moving on to multiplication/division. She did this all by herself, entirely self-motivated, and her drive was to catch up to her brother and sister (she is 3 years younger than her closest sibling). At 5, all gone, and in just months. Literally, months.

I took her to a child psychologist I knew but vetted again. PhD and very conservative in diagnosis. He came out in 10 minutes and said he was sorry for what he had to tell us. We did medicate her during the school year, and weaned her as school ended and summer started. summers were hard. She’s an A or B student now in middle school in a program for exceptional children. It was a hard road and she wouldn’t have made it without the medication.

I could go into the ODD, the irrational arguments that she admits are irrational, but why? She gets better each year and that’s enough. Still it breaks my heart each and everyday as I remember who she was.

It’s instructive to read the intro to the DSM. The key point one will find is that the DSM does not describe mental illnesses. It describes syndromes that are supposed to represent pathologies. A syndrome is no more than a co-occurring set of symptoms without any supposition of a unifying causation.

Nor do these syndromes bear any necessary relationship to actual pathologies; what gets included in the DSM is essentially decided by politics. (Yes, they actually vote!)

The reality is that psychiatry is a pseudo-science, of no more validity than astrology, and a whole lot more harmful.

(For amusement, do a search on “placebo antidepressant study”–a recent study showed that antidepressant drugs were, in general, no more effective in treating depression than placebos.)

As might be expected, it’s a lot more complicated than “anti-depressants don’t work.” What the meta-study shows is that the three anti-depressants studied were, in cases of mild and moderate depression, no more or less effective than placebos. In cases of severe depression, the three anti-depressants were slightly more effective than placebos, and this wasn’t because the anti-depressants were more effective in these cases, but because placebos were less effective in these cases. One significant criticism of this meta-study is that it doesn’t reflect the way anti-depressants are prescribed. The typical way of dealing with depression is to try one drug and, if it doesn’t work, try another. There’s nothing in this meta-study which deals with this.

It’s interesting, and suggests further study, but it’s far too soon to declare that anti-depressants are this century’s snake oil.

I didn’t say they were snake oil. I didn’t even say that AD’s were ineffective, though I have a suspicion that we’ll eventually discover that any effectiveness they do have is accidental, sorta like how kicking a machine sometimes makes it work. 🙂 I merely thought that people would find the study interesting or, as I said, amusing.

“The reality is that psychiatry is a pseudo-science, of no more validity than astrology, and a whole lot more harmful.”

You’ve been reading about Freud, haven’t you?

No, too much study to the contrary to call Psychology a pseudo science (psychiatry is an MD degree with less psychology training than a PhD). Is it still in it’s infancy, still piecemeal, trying to find its way? Sure. And a lot of good understanding of human behavior has come from that. Human, or even animal behavior, makes particle physics look simple (it’s the math that has given us our modern physics, there is no math for human behavior). Love that Higgs-Boson, but there is no equivalent math for human behavior. It still is largely experiential, making it the most tentative of the sciences. You want to bitch that psychiatrists ignore that, no problem here, but they aren’t psychologists. I’ll go with a PhD psychologist before a psychiatrist any day.

Astrology? Pure BS with no hope, ever, ever, and ever, of being more than BS. Putting Psychology in that realm is like calling chemistry and alchemy equivalent studies. It may give you satisfaction, but the satisfaction isn’t real.

Please read more carefully. I was not talking about psychology; I was talking about psychiatry.

Psychiatry is a pseudo-science. Psychology, by contrast, is a proto-science.

“Science” has multiple meanings. In the broadest sense, any organized body of knowledge is a science. However, in the sense that applies to chemistry and psychology, “science” requires not only an organized body of knowledge but an accepted foundation and methodology (which may change over time). I call psychology a proto-science because it is still searching for its equivalent to atoms. It will really take off when it discovers its equivalent to the periodic table. I call psychiatry a pseudo-science because it is based on the false premise that “mind” is fully reducible to “body”.

Psychology and psychiatry are both so young, so still groping for their “atoms,” or since we’re also talking about astrology maybe we should say groping for their “gravity,” that even though there is some real science going on (maybe stuff goes around the sun instead of the Earth?), the silly stuff still gets in (maybe the planets are pushed around the sun by angels?). They may be a few notches above astrology, but they aren’t astronomy by a long shot. And when it comes to pop-psy, it’s geocentric horoscope land all the way.

However, psychiatry believes that it has found its “atoms”, in its premise that mental phenomena are really body phenomena. Since that premise is wrong, psychiatry isn’t merely young, it’s just plain wrong. There’s no question that mental phenomena are intimately related to body phenomena but, until that relationship is elucidated, there will be no real psychiatry.

Probably a better analogy for psychiatry’s place as a science would be to compare it to alchemy. The latter was based on an incorrect notion of the constituents of matter so, even though it occasionally produced interesting results, its explanation of those results was just wrong. Psychiatry is much the same, and neither are a science in any but the broadest sense of the term.

Astrology can do observations, and even predictions. I don’t mean “you will meet a tall, handsome stranger,” I mean that they noticed that every February, the sun was in the constellation of Aquarius, and then Pieces. Psychology (and by extension psychiatry) can do stuff like that. Alchemists may have noticed that if mixed this and that, such-and-such happened. But then they attributed it to Gods and spirits and essences of this and that. Psych gets into weird symbolism and the idea that their personal moral codes are the laws of nature. They know they shouldn’t, but it’s how they see things.

Well, some of them know they shouldn’t; the other ones go on talk shows.

Well, as I said earlier, I think that psychology is legitimate, it’s just not yet a proper science.

Psychiatry, as you note, can occasionally produce interesting and even useful results. But that’s not enough to make up for the evil it does, evil which it can do because most educated people–including legal professionals–believe that it is a science.

“Well, some of them know they shouldn’t; the other ones go on talk shows.”

“Well, as I said earlier, I think that psychology is legitimate, it’s just not yet a proper science.” Well, we can certainly work on legitimate while not being a proper science. Paleontology is both legitimate and proper, but their lab experiments suck.

Yes, and I can do observations on how many times my cat scratches in his box, as well predict how many times he tries to drag anything he can into his box, because he always does (I have owned some really weird cats, this one isn’t the weirdest, but dragging the shower curtain and towels into his box is a reason to kill yet he still lives only because my family holds me back. He also likes to play with my Chow-Shepard).

“Astrology can do observations, and even predictions. I don’t mean “you will meet a tall, handsome stranger,” I mean that they noticed that every February, the sun was in the constellation of Aquarius, and then Pieces.” The essence of Astrology today is to predict what you deny; Astronomy easily predicts what you ascribe to Astrology without claiming to predict what you deny while Astrology’s sole claim is to predict what you deny. A big difference. Astrology is a precursor to Astronomy, it should have died when Astronomy was born, but superstition lasts long. Astronomy doesn’t claim to predict your life’s story so Astrology stays for the hopeful and the feeble. Astronomy does do a good job on finding planets, galaxies, weird stars, and the structure of the Universe. Astrology not so much….

BTW, Egyptians, Aztecs, and Mayans did the same thing with a different Zodiac, if Zodiac is even applicable. Venus rising is a good starting point.

You can’t have both in the same paragraph or the same essay for god’s sake. “in its premise that mental phenomena are really body phenomena. Since that premise is wrong, psychiatry isn’t merely young, it’s just plain wrong. There’s no question that mental phenomena are intimately related to body phenomena but, until that relationship is elucidated, there will be no real psychiatry.”

I can elucidate a first level relationship. Allow me to cut your oxygen off for five minutes, in my climate three. Your “There’s no question that mental phenomena are intimately related to body phenomena” immediately reduces to mentality doesn’t exist without body (the brain being body). We are coming closer to understanding the bio-chemical and bio-electrical aspects of the brain, but that is still only first-or-second order. The real issue is sentience, we’ve come to realize at least one or more species have a level of sentience, but we can’t yet explain ours because of it’s an order of magnitude leap. Yet, a few minutes of oxygen deprivation and mentality ends and argument ceases.

Mortimer Adler wrote that brain couldn’t explain sentience, yet couldn’t unequivocally write that sentience could exist without brain. See the problem? It’s not the brain, it has to be something else because brain can’t explain it, he maintained. But he acknowledged without brain it doesn’t exist.

Brain (and possibly other parts of the body), in some sense causes mind. That’s certainly true. Without brain there is no mind, and much mental phenomena are determined by the brain.

That, however, is not relevant to the question of the validity of psychiatry. Psychiatry, adopting the reductionism of the hard sciences, says that there is no such thing as mind, that mind is entirely reducible to brain. Thoughts, knowledge, feelings, beliefs, memory, etc. do not exist as such. Instead, they are delusions or epiphenomena; the only real phenomena are the brain actions that in some way give rise to these phantasms.

Psychiatry says that you can’t know anything; whatever you are pleased to call knowledge is merely the happenstance of some brain actions. However, psychiatry also asserts its claim as a matter of knowledge. That contradiction is why psychiatry (and any reductionist psychological theory) is necessarily false.

I think we are arguing at cross-purposes, or just being cross with each other. I reject “there is no such thing as mind” because I don’t reject nurture as a modifier of the base of nature; that’s the mind, an experiential layer that modifies the brain to give conciousness (lest we have 3 month-olds fully conscious) which itself is only from the complexity of the brain, the two are inextricably tied (studies on others species give a level for this, the dog you may own may be at a 1.5 to 2.0 year level).

I realize that reductionism can lead reductionists to absurdity. They conflate their reductionism (a method in all sciences needed to simply get a handle on understanding phenomena) with the original state they reduced. They will argue that they have not lost sight of that original state, while still arguing the case from a reductionist position. People are people, education withoutstanding.

Your second paragraph, which does not represent all psychiatrists other than
as a group, is a description of psychiatry where the reduced state is taken as the original state. This ” Thoughts, knowledge, feelings, beliefs, memory, etc. do not exist as such. Instead, they are delusions or epiphenomena” is the realm of philosophers, not MDs with a minor or even major in psychology. They are not well trained enough to go there.

“However, psychiatry also asserts its claim as a matter of knowledge. That contradiction is why psychiatry (and any reductionist psychological theory) is necessarily false” but only if your claim of what psychiatry believes holds true (in other words, if it isn’t a classic without nuance straw man). Still you gave me a hearty laugh, because if not a straw man, it is an indictment of intellectual hypocrisy, which if true forces thought to the worth of an MD or PhD without interview.

Yeah, my bad. But psychiatry today is a subset of psychology (while still holding on to Freud and Jung) with drugs. I’ve found it to be less tentative than psychology, and a tendency to certainty is a tendency to less science.

And I do so wholeheartedly that one is pseudo and one proto. Though I won’t go with the periodic table analogy, primarily because psychology can’t be reduced to math, physics, and chemistry (the periodic table is really more physics than chemistry). It’s a different area of knowledge that can’t be reduced to math and/or physics. (Ultimately, I think all the natural world is reduced to math once the underlying principles are uncovered, and there’s the rub: uncovering those underlying principles; we are still in our childhood.)

Oh, I wish I had read further your comment. “I call psychiatry a pseudo-science because it is based on the false premise that “mind” is fully reducible to “body”.

Now, I can take this three ways: you’re repudiating reducing human actions to Skinner’s behaviorism; you’re accepting that the human brain, by it’s complexity, leads to something we can’t fully understand biologically or philosophically; or the soul is necessary to explain it. Skinner left us as automatons, reactive bodies; the soul leaves us as supernatural; our studies are showing that other species have at least some sentience, if not the full “I”.

I’ll go with our sentience, our mind, is an expression of physical complexity, a threshold. If you wish to test that: allow me to deprive you of oxygen for 5 to 10 minutes (at ambient temperature); or allow me to place a rather large caliber and exploding bullet in your brain. Afterwards, we’ll test mind and body. It won’t go well.

This argument that “mind” is separate from “body” has been so disproven so many times, if only in so many wars, that I tire of it. If your brain is gone, your mind is gone. Find an example otherwise, please. Find someone with their brain shredded by an expanding bullet, or fully dead from apoxia, who is fully aware and sentient. Have a conversation with them and record it as proof. Present it to the world so that we know “mind” has no dependence on “body. I’ll wait…

I won’t argue against that something mentality goes on afterwards, that special mind or soul, because there is no way to argue it. There is no way to prove it other than to maintain it true, and that’s not proof.

Still, I agree with you on psychiatry, yet not for your reason. That’ like the road not taken…

Psychiatry is behaviorism writ large, and is no more valid than behaviorism, which has no validity at all. The soul is, to be polite, not science. The middle ground requires rejecting reductionism; mind is produced by the body but is not reducible to the actions of the body.

(Reductionism is the premise that higher order phenomena can be entirely explained in terms of lower order phenomena. So, molecules can be explained entirely in terms of atoms and their interactions, atoms in terms of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and so on down to whatever the fundamental constituents of reality are. Reductionism is a very fruitful philosophical position but, however useful it is to us humans, reality is not required to be reductionist.)

Oh, I can’t go entirely with psychiatry = behaviorism. I read a lot of Skinner, the ultimate in life as automaton. I reject Skinner because he made mind only automaton; he did this primarily because we can’t truly measure which it is like many things we can’t measure (quantum physics has taken a leap in this regard just lately, the Cat may really be dead). Still, just because we can’t measure it doesn’t mean we should make absurd claims.

The soul is not science, it is solely (an alliteration) metaphysical as the claim is that soul exists prior body and post body (want to give the soul life only when the body has life and death when the body dies?). The mind, however doesn’t, unless you equate mind to soul which leads to other problems (how many souls exist?, when the population hits 12 billion are we exhausting souls or is there an infinite number of souls, all representing mind? What do those souls do while waiting for their body?; play chess, cribbage, or scrabble? Animals that exhibit some form of mind have what? 1/4 soul?)

“Reductionism is a very fruitful philosophical position but, however useful it is to us humans, reality is not required to be reductionist.” It may be a fruitful philosophical position, but in this context it is a tool of science seperate from philosophy and has long been one. Don’t switch from one area of knowledge to another if only to avoid confusion by confusing areas…I don’t and I won’t let you. There is a philosophy of science or a philosophy to science, but it doesn’t mean Science is Philosophy.

Reductionism doesn’t claim to be reality and shouldn’t, though I would agree some reductionists forget that, it is only a method to get a handle on reality. As understanding increases, reductionism decreases. We now handle physics and astronomy in ways that are well past the reductionism of the middle 20th Century. We do the same in architecture (it now takes in Einstiening physics as well the Newtonian subset), and will hopefully in the behavioral sciences by mapping the brain and the genes.

“Reductionism is the premise that higher order phenomena can be entirely explained in terms of lower order phenomena.” Science recognizes your problem with this “In the context of organizational behavior, following the view that a cohesive group is more than the sum of its parts, synergy is the ability of a group to outperform even its best individual member”. It neither rejects nor embraces “that higher order phenomena can be entirely explained in terms of lower order phenomena”. It’s all best fit, whether the “sum of the whole exceeds its components” or doesn’t.

“When health is equated with freedom, liberty as a political concept vanishes. We understand and accept the person who prefers security over liberty, but we do not understand or accept the person who prefers disease over health, death over life.”

“The pharmacrats’ agenda, based on the new coercive therapeutic concept of disease, differs radically from the medical scientist’s agenda, based on the old noncoercive-pathological concept of disease. To advance their agenda, the pharmacrats shift the focus—their own and the public’s—from phenomenon to tactic, from objectively demonstrable disease to dramatically advertised prevention and treatment. . . . . In one case, we speak about doctors helping patients to overcome diseases, in the other about doctors preventing citizens from doing what they want to do.”

Szasz (may he RIP) was a good counterpoint to the excesses of psychiatric certainty (think of how many people were involuntarily committed in the 20th Century), but I can’t take him in anyway other than another voice. One to be listened to but not definitive, not the defining voice.

The necessary gadfly against a hubris that suffers little while making others suffer too much.

But the really sad thing is that there are serious psychiatric disorders, such as the three types of bipolar disorder, that are drastically under-diagnosed, which together with far too great of a reliance on medications without therapy or inadequate therapy, leads to a lot of suffering by both patients, family friends, and society as a whole.

I was taught that there was also a 4th, atypical, which can actually masquerade as unipolar depression, for example (the I, II, and rapid-cycle being the three I presume). Stats are something like 1:100 but you’re likely right that it is under diagnosed, while other things are wildly over diagnosed (such as ADD, ADHD, and ODD).

I do not believe the 4th is in the DSM IV yet, i.e., it is not accepted by the psychiatric community as a whole. Type != manic depression, Type II= hypomania, Type III= Cyclothymia. I was not aware of how underdiagnosed we were (I am Type III) until I saw an ad by Mark Harmon (NCIS) saying half of all bipolar people are undiagnosed or improperly diagnosed (usually Type II or III) last spring. Checked it out, discovered it was true. (Web MD if I remember correctly, but don’t hold me to it.)

So, I may wait. All things come to fruition in the passage of time. The DSM will provide.

The way I took atypical is as follows: think of a voltage level, you’re always under or at that voltage level, never above, but the swing is wild. So you’re either not depressed, or you are going through the swings of maybe, mildly, moderately, or severely. Unipolar describes the same behavior. Atypical though makes your insurance premium go way up…

The whole being the crux of DSM, individual psychiatrists can vary. The most obnoxious thing about an atypical bipolar diagnosis is that if it is actually unipolar then that psychiatrist has just ruined chances of affordable health insurance or life insurance, even with Obama. The actuarial tables on any form of bipolar are not good; unipolar is much better.

It is truly regrettable how many seem to be going along with the concept of sex addiction, which will make it easier for fundamentalists to promote same sex attraction disorder (SSAD). People who today, would not recriminalize homosexuality are nevertheless collaborating in laying the groundwork for future attempts at recriminalization.

One small speedbump in “the groundwork” for recriminalization now exists in California.

Just this week, Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown signed into law a bill banning so-called “reparative therapy” for minors. Such “therapy” has long been hawked by various religious based “therapists”. The purpose of the “therapy” is to change sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual.

Adults, presumably homosexual adults, can decide to undergo the “therapy”, but at least it can’t be inflicted on minors in California.

Already, a religious based organization called NARTH has announced intention to file a challenge to the law.

I really hate our puritanical view of addiction, but there are times where addiction should be viewed as bad. Sex addiction when it leads to the destruction of your family, disease, and loss of job (the latter may be from my first sentence), and you realize you can’t control it, it is an addiction in the truly bad sense. Addiction isn’t bad in itself (even chemical), it’s when you have no control over it and it’s destructive. If you can’t miss golf five times a week, and you’re destroying your relationship with wife and kids, you’re on the bad side of addiction.

As for this: “It is truly regrettable how many seem to be going along with the concept of sex addiction, which will make it easier for fundamentalists to promote same sex attraction disorder (SSAD). People who today, would not recriminalize homosexuality are nevertheless collaborating in laying the groundwork for future attempts at recriminalization.”; Phfffftttt. Sex addiction has nothing to do with the political agenda of homosexuals, and going “fundamentalist” is just a red herring. It’s real if destructive. Fundamentalists use opportunity, radical political homosexuals do the same.

Oh, BTW, I’ve been a supporter of gay rights since 1967 at 13 (I had this friend…), but that doesn’t mean I support everything in the political agenda. I’ll quote that well known homophobe Elton John: “You get the same equal rights that we do when we have a civil partnership. Heterosexual people get married. We can have civil partnerships.” I split on the marriage definition, because I saw an attempt to redefine and act like that definition was always there. I dislike redefinitions. Positive or negative, they always leave collateral damage.

There is no such thing as sex addiction: no way, no how. It’s a nonsense term. One can be OBSESSED with sex, but not “addicted”. Nor is this splitting hairs; it’s an extremely meaningful distinction the promoters of “sex addiction” (who, I might add, are practically unique to America) obfuscate in order to promote an anti-sex agenda. Read the first link, then this article from Dr. Marty Klein.

We’ll argue this point. If you can be addicted to golf or golf or tennis, you can be addicted to sex. The problem with moralists is that they put moral freight on it, when the only freight is the impact on your life. Obsession, when destructive, is addiction.

I’m obsessed with sex, I like it for multiple reasons beyond orgasm, but that obsession is aimed at my wife. She’s a really great sex object and even more a human worth having sex with (trying to cover a wide meaning of sex for males; the female view of sex only being one half of the real meaning of sex). No freight or impact, other then at this point my wife wants more sex than I do. Marriage is always a wax and wane.

I don’t take the word addiction as anything more than neutral: I was addicted to doing push-ups (200 plus), everyday, missing a day and I felt I had missed something in my life. Something was lacking, but it didn’t lead to destructive behavior.

Again, behavior is only an addiction if destructive. I’m giving the moralists their due while understanding they don’t know their due, they carry it to absurdity . I disagree with your linked essay.

One can’t be addicted to golf or tennis. Addiction has a specific meaning, and it isn’t “likes such-and-such a lot”, “enjoys such-and-such”, “is obsessed with such-and-such” or anything else. If there are no gross biochemical changes resulting from something and causing a harmful effect if it’s withdrawn, there is no addiction. Period. End of line. That’s all she wrote.

“One can’t be addicted to golf or tennis”, but of course one can, just like weight-lifting or yoga. I’ve known people that exhibited irritated aggressive behavior if they didn’t do the particular behavior. The addiction is the need to do it, can’t do with out it, in this sense. That’s a psychological need not a physical need and has nothing to do with withdrawal as you define it.

Again, addiction means nothing to me unless it leads to destructive behavior. If I’m addicted to reading 8 hours a day, it means nothing unless it destroys my relationship with others, which it would. Otherwise, it’s a good pastime.

“If there are no gross biochemical changes resulting from something and causing a harmful effect if it’s withdrawn, there is no addiction. Period. End of line. That’s all she wrote.” Again, a definition of addiction that ignores the psychological for only the physiological.

I’m not denying either, but again addiction is only an issue if it’s destructive.

I have a feeling we are at a moment of agree to disagree as I won’t budge.

No, one can’t. Addiction has a specific medical meaning. To use it to mean “craving” is the exact equivalent of a small child saying he’s “starving” when he means “hungry”. They aren’t the same thing, at all, no matter how people choose to popularly misuse the term.

Here’s my favorite: unique. It doesn’t bother me so much, well no so much, when an ordinary person uses “unique” to mean “rare” or “unusual.” After all, that’s what he’s hearing in the news and such, from people who get paid to use the English language.

It does, though, bother the hell out of me when professional journalists do it.
“Quite unique.”
“Very unique.”
Even “somewhat unique.”
And my personal favorite, “one of the most unique.”

Once you say “one of the” you’ve already left “unique” behind. I typically start snarling at my TV.
“Oh, it’s one of the most unique, is it? Is it uniquer than the other one? Is it one of the most uniquest of all?!”

Again, these guys get paid to use the English language, and when they pull this stuff, they’re not earning their money.

Another annoyance, discovered just now: my spell check didn’t flag “uniquer” and “uniquest” as misspellings. What the hell?

No matter what ERB wrote, John Carter wasn’t unique, though he was in unique circumstances (a hot babe on Mars with Mars having no chance or supporting that level of life is unique). However, you are right as any qualifier added, any adjective added, likely destroys “unique”. Me, I’m still working on how decimate became exterminate…Not even the Romans meant that or they would have killed so many more people (the Jews would be gone).

Unique really means “only one” in any specific circumstance. Audie L. Murphy may have been a unique American in WWII, but I still see it as a stretch.

Now, if you were attempting to in someway obscurely parse me in my argument with Maggie…

Hi, Maggie,
Yeah, I’m hard-headed, an endearing quality. “If there are no gross biochemical changes resulting from something and causing a harmful effect if it’s withdrawn, there is no addiction.” So, there is no psychological addiction, it doesn’t exist? (I do understand the catch-all of “harmful effect”) Not an adjunct to the physiological whatsoever?

I was a weightlifter, when I went without there were actual physiological effects, a physical craving you dismiss but is nothing like “To use it to mean “craving” is the exact equivalent of a small child saying he’s “starving” when he means “hungry”, it was a very specific, very physical feeling, and not a confusion of words. Long distance runners experience similar. We do have normally occurring equivalents to opiates that can be called on. In my case, the psychological was part of it, but the physical was also.

If you want to use a “very strict medical definition”, one I dispute, how about adhering to the DSM? It isn’t medical enough?

Maggie, I have a lot of respect for you but that doesn’t mean I can’t disagree, nor that if you want to hold to one medical definition, I can’t hold you to other ones.

If the definition of “addiction” is only physiological and external, then the definition lacks.

I’d guess that there is a great deal of over diagnosis, then every once in a while I end up with a truely crazy client. I have one now who thinks or rather thought that she was a black ops in Vietnam during the war (she’s about 35) she spoke in word salads when she came to my office. We finally convinced her to start taking psychotropics and the change has been tremendous. She is intelligent and funny and in this world.

So I’m not sure where the line is. Perhaps it is just that once you start graduating psychologists you have to have patients enough for all of them.

“Perhaps it is just that once you start graduating psychologists you have to have patients enough for all of them.”

Well let’s change that to “Perhaps it is just that once you start graduating doctors you have to have patients enough for all of them.” It doesn’t make as much sense does it? You really don’t think Medical academics come up with diseases so doctors can earn money do you?

If I had used lawyers? OK, there the problem is politician lawyers are our lawmakers, but give little attention to other lawyers unless they fill their campaign coffers. Tort lawyers do, but CDL’s are just a pain as they get in the way of “tough on crime” and give too little money.

I don’t believe the DSM creates diagnoses for money, but I do believe it likely over creates mental disorders. That’s a flaw of the field, not an indication of avarice.

I first read about Oppositional Defiant Disorder in Mike Males’ book, The Scapegoat Generation. I can seriously recommend this book, BUT! do note that it came out in the 1990s. All the teenagers he’s talking about are in there thirties now.

Which of course doesn’t mean ODD doesn’t exist just that its abused by over diagnosis. The problem I have with these books, and I did look at your link as well your review, is too many use them to claim it doesn’t exist at all or its pervasive, even though that wasn’t the author’s intent. I am amused angrily by the its either 0% or its 100% people.

OK, I can go with that. As an example, it would be wrong for us to pretend that there are NO adults who want to harm children. But it’s also wrong for us to pretend that Chester the Molester or Freddy Kruger is hiding behind every tree.

Things like ODD bother me because it looks suspiciously like “argues with parents and teachers.” That may be a problem for the parents, or for the teachers, or for the kid, but a “disorder?” Now, there may actually be a disorder which goes beyond “argumentative” or “bratty” in the same way that kleptomania goes beyond “likes a five-finger discount.” But if so, please be very, very careful, because something like that is ripe for abuse.

It is ripe for abuse, certainly, but it isn’t always abused. I can only go by what I saw with my daughter to know that it isn’t always abused. It’s why I was careful with the psychologist, I really wanted a different diagnosis so very, very much.

The argumentation by ODD children is beyond what most of us experience with our other children. I have two other to draw from that give foundation. They are “normal” (the first on full scholarship in a collegiate honors program, the second heads her HS TA program, 4.0 all the way) and they understand me when I say something needs to be done. But I have this one child…

Her arguments when she is on a roll are so irrational that no adult can fully address them. She is substantially different than the other two. She isn’t bratty, or even argumentative, she is something else.

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